Today (yesterday?) is Blog Action Day '09, and the topic is "Climate Change". What a depressing, yet uplifting topic to blog about!

When you were just small kiddos, did you ever imagined how Earth would look like from space? Guess it would look like this:

I can't help but post this: ∃ vegetarian spiders!

This is so cool! And looks more traumatising than $WORK!

Hmm, where's the coffee though...

Recently, I have started to migrate my scripts to use Puppet. Everything from initial system provisioning to manual failover systems had been converted. Wee~

Yesterday, my Sun Microsystems vendor pointed out something I didn't want to think about: as my data storage climbs into multi-terabytes, our current way of storing/distributing data is no longer feasible. Damn, multi-terabyte datasets are irksome...

Here's some idea of the problem.
1) Everyone needs to see all these data, across many different computation machines.
2) Each dataset may need to be "live" for years, as research can take years to fruit. Hence, multi-stage storage strategy may not be applicable.

Wow! The best anti-war banner I've seen so far:

From Geeksaresexy.net: War Protesting Geek Style"

</war> </war> </war>

Win. Can anyone be so dumb as to do this?!

[Gizmodo: How to win a Darwin Award: Float a live surge protector in a pool on flip flops]

Wee~, I have ported the old blog into this new one. It's still Drupal. The previous site layout and tags don't make much sense, especially since I started working, hence the makeover.

New features:

• Search now powered by Google
• Shoutbox!! Finally...
• Technorati tag cloud

Wow, New Scientist has highlighted a new study from quirky pychologist Richard Wiseman, in which he measured people's walking speed on an uncrowded 18 metres long pavement.

New Scientist Short Sharp Science: Quickstep World is Walking Faster
Quirkology Pace of Life Project

As mentioned previously, I had to mirror a server for testing purposes across two networks through a computer in the middle. The best way I found was to do an rsync over ssh, but this requires a non-password authentication, hence I have to set up a RSA key-pair login.